The document outlines insights from Cathy Ma on essential considerations for becoming a successful product manager, emphasizing the importance of understanding your product, audience, and agile methodologies. It also highlights key references for product management literature and encourages prospective managers to embrace challenges and develop domain expertise. Additional topics include managing product success and the significance of saying no to unnecessary requests.

1. 7 Things I wish I knew
before becoming a Product Manager
Cathy Ma @cathyma
Social Media Product Manager, IPC Media

2. 1. Product Manager?

3. “to discover a product that is valuable,
usable and feasible”
Inspired, Marty Cagan
http://www.bbctraining.com/documents/product_mgt_report.pdf

4. “Someone who translates business
problems into solutions by shaping
products”
Mary‐Beth Christie
Head of Product, Financial Times

5. “Someone who unambiguously thinks
that they are responsible for the
success or failure of the product.”
Anthony Rose BBC

6. 2. Pick your product

8. 3. Know your audience

10. 4. Domain Expertise

11. IPC’s Single-Sign-On system

16. Referral change since Open Graph was launched

17. Referral change since Open Graph was launched
7 months prior
1. Google
2. Direct
3. Yahoo
4. Bing
5. Forums

18. Referral change since Open Graph was launched
7 months prior 7 months into
1. Google 1. Google
2. Direct 2. Direct
3. Yahoo 3. Yahoo
4. Bing 4. Facebook
5. Forums 5. Bing

19. Referral instances from Search and Facebook
Top 4 search referrals* Facebook.com
*google.com, google.co.uk, live.com & yahoo.com

20. Referral instances from Search and Facebook
Top 4 search referrals* Facebook.com
*google.com, google.co.uk, live.com & yahoo.com

21. Pages/Visits upon referral methods (April-Oct 2010)

22. Pages/Visits upon referral methods (April-Oct 2010)
Search still drive higher
page/visit than Facebook

23. 5. Being Agile

31. Acceptance Criteria!!!

32. 6. Good Stationery

35. 7. Do Say No

36. Good ‘teachers’
1.Manage It! Rothman
2.Ship It! Richardson/Gwaltney
3.Agile Product Management with Scrum, Schwaber
4.Don’t make me think, Krug
5.The Mythical Man Month, Brooks
6.Information Architecture for the WWW,
Morville & Rosenfeld

37. We are hiring!
• Mobile Product Manager
• Senior Test Analyst
• Developers
Cathy Ma
cathy_ma@ipcmedia.com
@cathyma
Social Media Product Manager, IPC Media

38. Image credits
Illustrative images licensed as creative commons by attribution only from Flickr:
• Slide 20: http://softlinksolutions.com/development_methodology.aspx
• Say No http://www.flickr.com/photos/pezz/447411079